Warm & Tight

It has never been terribly hard to tell a society matron from a schoolgirl. One has a corsage of wet violets pinned to her lapel and the other smells faintly of peanut butter. But over the past few years both clubwomen and students, along with salesgirls, social workers, grandmothers and governesses, have adopted a common undergarment, and whatever the figure and however different the proportions, the total basic result is the same. Everyone is wearing stretch tights.

No Girdle Needed. Once the uniform of ballet dancers (who wore the real, torso-covering thing), leotards were snatched from behind the practice barre, called tights, and put in department-store windows some five years ago. They were first shown under tartan skirts for college girls, and bought not as particularly proper but as overwhelmingly practical. No girdle or garter belt was needed, and no longer were knees, neglected between the long socks' end and the slip's beginning, left bare to redden in the cold; slips, in fact, might be completely forgotten, too, as the long tights were warmer and less bulky. But tights remained off limits off campus. Not so, of course, for beatniks, whose heavy black turtleneck sweaters had never looked particularly go with white tennis socks and who instantly seized upon the stockings (in black only) as the hashishiest thing around.

With the appropriation of tights by the far-out set, the slightly farther-ins kept their distance. But mothers began bundling their children into tights and sending them off, red, blue-and green-legged, into the winter days. Suburbanites took to wearing tights to the shopping center, bowling alley or even out to dinner. Manhattan secretaries, used to arriving at the office frozen from the blizzard that began at the subway exit, threw caution into the Out basket and showed up for work in tights. Grandes dames, off through the snow to the party of the year, wore tights beneath their full-length ballgowns.

No Shape So Shapely. Today, no fad any more but an established part of winter life, stretch tights are everywhere: a book-loaded matron trudged up snowy Beacon Hill in Boston last week, a veritable bulk of muskrat coat and red tights; Los Angeles ladies strolled down Wilshire Boulevard topped in sunglasses and bottomed in tights; and across the country, suburbanites in colored tights wheeled through supermarkets with daughters swinging similarly bestockinged legs out of shopping carts. Because stretch tights have a way of making almost any shape look more shapely, because they are as warming as the hottest toddy, and because, in the private reflection of her bedroom mirror, their wearer is the sexiest thing going, there is hardly a woman around who does not own a pair or ten.

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